People can employ at least two different strategies in comprehending
the description of a social event. On one hand, they might
interpret the information in terms of semantic concepts pertaining
to the type of event described or the situation in which it occurred.
In this case, their reactions to the event are likely to be similar
regardless of the form in which the information is presented. Alternatively,
recipients might try to form a visual image of the event
being described and base their reactions on this image. In this case,
their reactions are likely to depend on characteristics of the information
that influence the type of image they construct and the difficulty
of forming it.
The tendency to construct visual images from verbal information
can depend on how the information is presented. Adaval
and her colleagues (Adaval, Isbell, & Wyer, 2007; see also Adaval
& Wyer, 1998), for example, found that when the events that occurred
in the life of a politician were described in a temporally-ordered
narrative, participants appeared to form a mental image of
the sequence of events as a whole. In this case, accompanying
the verbal event descriptions with a picture facilitated their construction
of this image and increased the extremity of the evaluations
they based on it. When the same events were described in an
ostensibly unordered list, however, recipients appeared to evaluate
the semantic implications of each event independently without
forming images. In this case, pictures interfered with recipients’
integration of these semantic implications and decreased the
extremity of their evaluations.